My Heart Is Broken

There are not enough tears to express the sadness I feel for what happened in Syria yesterday. Nerve gas attacks by the government on the people of Syria. The footage of children suffering just before succumbing to its dreadful effects is unbearable. The fact that such a thing is possible speaks to the madness of the world we live in.

I sit here at work barely keeping it together. I know there is a flood of tears to come at the slightest trigger. I don’t know how to continue like normal after seeing such a thing. I don’t want to continue like normal. I don’t want to be that guy who’s numb and can casually move past this. How can anyone continue on with such unnecessary pain occurring in the world?

Why Children?

Children represent how life wants to be lived. They go about in total presence enjoying every ounce of each and every little thing they come across. Children are our guide to happiness, our bringers of joy, and the brightest ray of hope in this mad world. I am convinced we are born into this world with life figured out and spend the rest of our time unlearning it. Yesterday’s attack is a cry for help from humanity. We are lost and we don’t know how to find our way back.

But what can I do? What do I want to do?

What I want is for this not to have happened. To undo it. To prevent the suffering of those who suffered. Spiritually I know this is non-acceptance of what is. To deny this has happened is to live with anger clouding everything. And anger leads to a desire for vengeance. That those responsible must pay dearly. But that pattern has no end. It’s how you get there in the first place. Every act of violence results in an escalated act of violence.

We are all in this together

Much like a person who gets a serious illness, humanity is sick. While it is a few people who carry out the most dreadful of acts it is still humanity as a whole that is sick. When a person gets lung cancer they don’t say my lungs have cancer, they say I have cancer. Thus there is no real separation between us and those capable of heinous acts. We are at different ends of a scale but still on the same scale. If one is sick, we are all sick.

It’s time to question everything

We have got it wrong people. We aren’t slightly wrong, we’re not a little bit off target, we are way wrong. And we need to open our eyes to see it. We need to question our whole way of life. Science, Religion, Democracy, Capitalism, Socialism, Education, that 9 to 5 job, or that 6 to 6 job. What are any of these things accomplishing that is truly meaningful? What are they helping us become? Will they lead us to peace and happiness?

What do you want from life

Figuring out what you want from life is difficult. People will rarely say “I have everything I want” because they aren’t happy (or often very unhappy), and they need to assign that gap to something. If they watch enough TV I am sure they will assign that gap to something we can buy. If we spend endless hours at work that gap will be the promotion that we are longing for. If you’re in politics it’s likely more power that you crave.

But what if that gap wasn’t real

The essence of Spirituality is that we already have everything we need to feel Peace, Joy and Love. This is my path but this is also where my gap lies. Though I am not yet there I can sense the wisdom of looking internally instead of externally for happiness. I believe spirituality taps into the essence of who we are and that’s what Children are born with.

The majority of those who find spirituality later in life have found it through their own suffering. It is also sure that suffering in this world is increasing at an alarming rate. Perhaps it is our destiny to find spirituality this way. My only hope is that we can awaken enough to minimize the suffering along the way.